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rdmsr

58 karma · joined September 9, 2016

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rdmsr··on FBI's Use of Paid Best Buy Informants Goes Deeper Than We Knew
It’s probably implied by something deep in the TOS.
rdmsr··on "Principles of Adult Behavior" by JP Barlow
What does the phrase "blood sport" mean here? Giving up literal blood sports seems so obvious as to not be worth mentioning, but metaphorical ones so vague that there's probably a better way to phrase it.
rdmsr··on Reverse Engineering x86 Processor Microcode [pdf]
Microcode updates have to be rerun every boot since the updates aren't stored. Modern chips use only signed updates.

I'd be pretty surprised if they were successfully attacking chips through this mechanism. There are so many other devices that are much easier to own.

rdmsr··on Attacks on Encrypted Databases [pdf]
I should really read that paper, since I'm sort of confused by the threat model. Arbitrary queries seem like they would defeat the point. So I'm assuming this "using a secure, authenticated channel to communicate out, while still being monitored by the OS" model. That's a high bar for software not designed for SGX.

I presume it's relying on the paging behavior of SGX? (Either page faults or dirty bits).

rdmsr··on Attacks on Encrypted Databases [pdf]
Not without CPU support. Intel SGX, AMD SEV (sort of), and ARM trustzone (if you want to do a lot of work) make this possible.
rdmsr··on Alex Honnold Scales El Capitan Without Ropes, and the Climbing World Reels
People fall all the time. Climbers test movements by doing them (and most don't work).

Honnold left chalk marks on key holds on freerider to ensure he grabbed the right pieces.

rdmsr··on VME Broken on AMD Ryzen
One of the big selling points of x86 is backwards compatibility. If you have some OS from 1990 you can still run it (without emulation or virtualization, so long as it doesn't depend on clock speed), which is pretty crazy.

Slight aside, there are a lot of reasons that Itanium failed, but certainly one of them was lack of backwards compatibility.

rdmsr··on How much do hedge fund traders earn?
Probably because the perceived skill difference between this and many other modern jobs is small. I can imagine people being incredulous that this is skill rather than something less deserved (luck/situation/...).

The skill difference between your average SWE (or even average college basketball player) and an NBA player is pretty massive (and quite visible). I'd imagine it's much harder to find an someone that says 'yeah that's easy I could do that' about an NBA career...

rdmsr··on Turkey is sliding into dictatorship
All you need for constitutional reform is a 50% majority on a referendum. That seems way too easy.
rdmsr··on Against Willpower
It's a comic that oversimplifies philosophical arguments and (often) makes fun of them.
rdmsr··on Against Willpower
It's not that 'having' willpower is bad, it's that the concept is misleading. Pretty much any story where someone changes themselves (or tries to) can be coerced into an anecdote about willpower.

The point here is that the thing which decides whether or not someone succeeds at changing themselves is not the having/not having of willpower, it's everything else. And willpower as a concept is just one more distraction.

rdmsr··on Dopamine Cells Influence Our Perception of Time
There was an article earlier this week on HN about the effects of stimulants on Chess Ability that was oddly consistent with this: https://worldchess.com/2017/01/25/special-report-new-study-f...

In particular, players would tend to lose on time more often when taking stimulants. When framed from the perspective of this article, that effect becomes "obvious".

rdmsr··on Ways we harden our KVM hypervisor at Google Cloud: Security in plaintext
Probably means that upgrades are done in-place. They don't move the VM between machines, but they do something like move it from the old process to and upgraded version (or in some other way upgrade the software underneath).
rdmsr··on Running as a Thinking Person’s Sport
It's a solid book, although I don't recall the bit that you're citing. I didn't read it that thoroughly. Started it and realized that I'd rather work towards 5.13 than the summit of Everest/Denali/whatever.
rdmsr··on Intel X86 Encoder Decoder
Probably not (but who knows, you could probably use this as part of a fuzzer). Instruction emulation is a superset of instruction decoding. You need to decode and then emulate the behavior.

Aside: Instruction emulation is pretty finicky and bug prone. I'm not too familiar with Xen, but KVM has had at least 10 instruction emulation CVEs. There were talks at both KVM Forum and Xen Summit last summer mentioning the sketchiness of instruction emulation.

rdmsr··on Running as a Thinking Person’s Sport
Not sure what is meant by that commenter, but weight loss and strength gains are common goals which running isn't the most efficient at achieving. Obviously, it still impacts these and, obviously, those aren't goals for everyone.

Running is great at improving cardiovascular output (honestly not sure how it compares to biking and swimming), but that isn't all of fitness.

rdmsr··on Vitamin pills don't work and may be bad for you
I can't tell if you are trolling: Many parts of the world don't have ample sunshine or nice weather, particularly in winter.
rdmsr··on 5-Level Paging and 5-Level EPT [pdf]
Fun fact: physical addresses will still have at most 52 bits, despite linear address space having up to 57.
rdmsr··on Total Nightmare: USB-C and Thunderbolt 3
Recent MacBook pros use the IOMMU for isolating PCI devices. With that, the devices can't read arbitrary ram (if Apple configures it correctly).
rdmsr··on Snapchat Releases First Hardware Product, Spectacles
This is definitely the result of Snapchat's acquisition of Epiphany Eyewear back in 2013[1], which was a startup that made something very similar.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphany_Eyewear

rdmsr··on Teaching Concurrency (2009) [pdf]
An open source version (remake?) of the game exists[1].

[1] https://www.openttd.org/en/